


The Sublime

by Lucretius



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Genre-subverting the genre-subversion, Happy Ending, Happy K-Day, Hermann wins the drift, M/M, One Shot, Romanticism, Someone read Ulysses, The Drift (Pacific Rim)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-10
Updated: 2014-08-10
Packaged: 2018-02-12 13:29:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,319
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2111673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lucretius/pseuds/Lucretius
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The waves are coming closer to them now, and yes, the tide is coming to them with crescendo crashes.</p><p>The white fringe of sea is mere fathoms away.</p><p>“Can we?” Hermann asks.</p><p>And it is the question that one asks because, the choice having been made in what feels like another lifetime, now, for the first time, there is someone here, here, <em>right here</em>—who can see a way of being and seeing long dormant under so many layers of performing and seeming.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Sublime

He had been staring at the sea for so many hours since the clock spun out its zeroes that he had modeled it quite thoroughly—conic sections and chalk lines—under his shut eyelids.

But when he shuts his eyelids, it is not enough.

So once more, T+14 hours post-apocalypse, he opens his eyes onto the pre-dawn of the South China Sea, scrolling towards him with small rustling crushes against the sands of Miracle Mile.

And another soft crush.

And once more…

He could almost see the waves curl inwards, needlepricks in the distance like pulling out a shoelace knot with a celesta’s chime. These waves…modeling themselves with attendant _As_ and golden spirals.

He was… _what percentile sure, again?_ …that this— _sea change_ —Newton, _really_?…was not a lingering side effect from the drift with the kaiju. Not some primal yearning for the sea. No. He really couldn’t feel their mind, at all.

Raleigh Becket and Mako had drawn the honor of hunting him down first to talk specifically about _Drift-related side effects_ —he supposed as soon as they were retrieved from the Marianas. Now, he realizes how seriously fucked up they must have thought him, to check his sanity before so many other, more objectively worthy things. But then he was so unaware of his surroundings that he took them in stride.

Ten hours ago they had found him, alone. He had just poured out a cup of tequila from a sort of communal stockpile that had arranged itself under the Shatterdome clock. He walked down the line of Jaeger docks just to get outside and perhaps see some of the city's celebration, feeling something missing. The air of the skyline was a giant cloud of red fireworks smoke. A rocket whistled up and exploded into a petri dish of golden sparks. 

“Uh. Doctor Geiszler?”

“Newton. It’s Newton,” he repeated, turning around to see the pair, standing side-by-side. The thud of electronica bled out behind them from the center of the Shatterdome. Tendo had clearly taken some liberties with the PA system.

“We heard that you drifted with the kaiju again,” Raleigh said slowly.

“And Doctor Gottlieb,” Mako added.

“Yeah! Saved the world. Well, I mean, you guys saved the world. But we maxed out in scientist-related contributions.” 

Mako nodded kindly. Too kindly. Raleigh looked at her with raised eyebrows, but Newt didn’t notice as he was talking into his tequila.

Raleigh coughed. 

“We were just wondering if you had any, you know, side effects from the Drift. You had never drifted before just now, right?” Again that concerned voice.

“Nope, not once! Although, I mean, I have a doctorate in neurobiology, so the process is not rocket science. I mean quantum physics. I mean, ugh. I don’t want to sound like a dick, but there’s really nothing science-related that I’m not up on…”

“Geology?”

“Nah, one of my PhDs was in Environmental Sciences.”

He drained his drink.

“What did you want to ask me, again?”

Raleigh had stepped back, and perhaps some communal decision had been reached between the two of them via their own private chat line. Mako—who seemed extraordinarily gathered given everything _was what it was_ —tried to catch his eye.

“The drift isn’t as dangerous when you’re not connected to a Jaeger,” Mako said, “But it is not to be taken lightly. It is a skill to be mastered like any other. It is not shameful to not know how to process such an influx of information.”

“I can handle it! What? Do you think that I saw something traumatic?” He looked away out onto the sea, but quickly turned back with a glittering stare.

"..."

 

“No! I just feel a bit like after I took LSD for the first time. It’s okay. I’ll be absolutely fine, and I know with that look on your face that you’re not going to believe me, so I’ll just show you by just chilling. I need a vacation. I used to take them all of the time at MIT, but I haven’t had a day off since coming here. Except for the infection, but yeah…You remember that.”

Mako grabbed his hand. He knew that she remembered. Mako saw and remembered so much. Hers was a completely different type of intelligence than his: kinesthetic, mathematical. Hers was so goal and process oriented. He felt like she handled her knowledge like a masterful librarian. And he was a hoarder.

Now, he realizes that Raleigh and Mako were probably sent by Hansen, who was probably informed by Hermann, who was, at this moment, sitting across from a man whose face held the hard lines of not only age, but a callousness that had poisoned itself over his face like a Dickensian villain. Gottlieb Sr.: an downright frightening dude who is probably the one guy on planet Earth who doesn’t deserve this victory right now. Hermann’s leg hurt and so Newt massaged out the tiny folds of his own scrunched-up pants.

The neural hangover was most certainly a side effect from the second drift. No training, no preparation. Like, it needed to be done, and he didn’t feel like any thing more serious than some super-vivid flashbacks and a grainy video feed of what he assumes is Hermann’s emotional state. And it’s not like he was any more stressed than he has been his entire life—save for the whole tongue-probing episode. But even that was as much awesome as it was terrifying… Now that he thinks about it, the brutal lab schedule of the last ten years was the best sort of sanity-enforcer he could have asked for, in a weird way. And it’s not like he snorted a lot of coke or anything at MIT, but he had these swings that if submitted, hypothetically, to a certain diagnostic manual in its sixth iteration, would not not meet a certain number of criteria for a well-known mental illness. And being told to calm down, shut up, and get to work—not being allowed to wander off in the middle of the night and prowl the city, not being allowed to do anything but focus on the work. That really did limit the amount of trouble he could get into.

But he had been _so fucking stupid._

He sees himself seizing on the laboratory floor: definitely not his memory of blabbering to Pentecost.

 _I’m absolutely positive Hermann is having a better time of this_ , he thought, undoing his shirt cuff buttons and flicking the sand out of the sleeve, _having gone through at least one Jaeger piloting manual_. But Newton had not, and could not conjure up whatever pointers “Neural Drift 101” came with, even though he realized that most memories he had were now paired with a different—and he hated this word— _Weltanschauung_.

This act.

This staring at the sea.

This was not him.

He was, like, the least Romantic person ever. He always knew and now really knew—Post-Hermann Drift, that is…Oh God…”PHD”…another Doctorate…This time in _Hermann_ …This was _too fucking much_ —that that he was a bit of a Romantic. Yeah…he’s not totally self-deluded: the whole rock star dream, the compulsion to just show off with a more miss-than-hit charisma. But now that he has a whole other, shadowy animus to himself, he can see that what he thought passed as Romanticism is actually just tiny, pretty postcards shucked off of a totally goal-oriented, unexamined life.

If someone had the opportunity to tell him this Pre-H.D., that maybe he led a relatively unthoughtful existence, he would probably have said something really stupidly Newt: “Uh. Little bit busy getting _six doctoral degrees_ and, oh, uh _SAVING THE WORLD_.” Hermann would be in the background, nodding agreement with the leveler of this criticism and mouthing “You are completely right,” to said douchebag. Unless it was Hermann saying this criticism—and who are we kidding—in 99 out of 100 quantum worlds, it is definitely Hermann. 

But it had always been more of a software issue. When he was _upandup_ on the mood swing ride, you just didn’t have many other thoughts about yourself other than _This is what I have to do, and I can do anything_. Over the past fifteen years, he had been on the _upandup_ a lot.

As if to agree, yawning with splendor, the sun lifted itself over the horizon.

And he wanted to cry, for it was stupidly the most beautiful sight he had seen. Rays of relief bursting from the horizon line: the sun rises once more.

The lab. The lab was so dark, and when he wasn’t in the lab, he was in his room, and when he got out into the city, it had been, like _Blade Runner_ , always night.

It was like he hadn’t had a single thought to himself for ten years, and now here they were, calling.

His mind chooses to flashback to a moment from MIT, drift-style. It was right after he had defended his first dissertation to a group of professors in the computational biology department, all of whom were trying really hard not to smile. He admits that this first dissertation was a bit weak: imaging neural circuitry but not accounting for several important dynamic variables because he was already thinking about his next two PhD dissertations: an absolutely behemoth project of mind-mapping real-time and a slightly more manageable theory of mind basically inspired from Philip K. Dick.

He flung the doors out onto Mass. Ave., shining under the gorgeously bright spring day, and he then looked up at the cerulean-jewel sky, practically celebrating his academic triumph for him…Oh, his brain had prepared itself for a pre-K-day celebration the likes of which he should have had over and over again at many other milestones. The way that people, you know, usually celebrate life accomplishments: parties, gifts, time with friends…

Not siphoning off a cupful of tequila and heading towards the sea…

That day though, he was thousands of miles away from Kreuzberg, and he was only _16 years old_ , the second-youngest student ever to be admitted to MIT and already, already going to be the proud possessor of a doctoral degree.

Underlying this joy, was just a bit of frustration. Even though he absolutely loved biology and neurobiology and got those little releases of opium every time he packed away something else fantastic, each “Road to the PhD” meant a lot of things that were just fucking boring: dozens of pages of grant applications, sucking up to a lot of bad people, sitting around and waiting for things to grow/die in the lab without enough money to start a new project, Americanisms that just went over his head, and replacing jargon in English from German.

But this…this was worth it. He was so literally _young._ He is still so young, but back then the neurons were firing full force. And on that April day in the mid ’00s, he really didn’t have really…a single person in the whole Northeastern corridor to jump around and scream with, as his happiness begged him to do. He thought of his roommate: an experimental composer, who was currently in the middle of some sort of Berlioz-oxycontin-dream. He thought of his lab group, but he just didn’t even know how to begin inviting people to celebrate himself. That seemed a bit much. Even for him. So he walked out onto the Mass. Ave. Bridge, the spring wind shucking up the Charles River, a glittering mess of MIT sailboats to the west, a cluster of planted, silver-red skyscrapers to the east. The T rumbled across the river just a bit further down. And the sea just further out, past the alighting jetliner from Logan that slew up into the sky. Pure happiness. Is it something that only happens when you are a child? Now, this is happiness, but it needs more chaser to go down. He is looking at the sea to act as a table on which to lay his happiness, just like that day.

Hermann is finishing his meeting—he can tell from the attendant stress seeping into his leg. It is really just fascinating what the neural bridge entails. After six hours of observant consciousness, it seems that Newt can’t exactly read Hermann’s mind (but then again, Hermann just has cultivated more discipline—an admission that Newt really hopes he can’t hear). He tries to actually see the beach in front of him and thus send the image across the bay into the bowels of the Shatterdome, to where Hermann is rolling his eyes and commandeering one of the floor carts.

To broadcast that he might just want someone there besides _Raleigh fucking Becket_ to debrief him about what the hell happens next. Mako was great, but even Newt—with his admittedly limited emotional capacity—knew that she didn’t need to be fielding him right now. He was almost twice her age and oh God, her dad had just _died_. A pang of shame bled through him. He just needs to _get it together_. Even though it had only been 14 hours since the clock ran out, Newt had built a life around world-saving, and damn it to Hell if he wasn’t going to continue searching for answers. Hard to win as they might be.

He hears the faint rumble of an engine behind him. A car door slams, followed by tripletted foot clicks along the boardwalk.

“It’s like astral projection, man. I can see you coming and see myself looking like a giant hipster loser.”

“Your thoughts—”

“—are the loudest thing in the entire Hong Kong metropolis.”

“Quite.”

He lays that ridiculous parka down onto the sand— _er liegt die Jäcke auf dem Strand_ —ruffles it around a bit, and then collects himself on it like some Victorian riding side-saddle.

“Come on, man. Just stretch out. Everything’s over.”

Surprisingly, Hermann jerks his legs out in front of him and then curls up over them, pulls off each Oxford, pulls off each sock, delicately rolls up the cuffs on each of his trousers. First the left. Then the right.

"..."

"..."

“I didn’t know you still thought in German.”

“I didn’t know you _spoke it_.”

“You mean, we could have been yelling at each other in _German_?

Hermann smiles, not with his teeth, but yes, at least with his eyes. The sun is now lighting the entire bay, throwing off a near-blinding glimmer that travels to their bare feet. 

“I suppose you saw what happened with my father.”

“Look. I think that you’re right generally about what I bring to the table neurally. I’m not sensitive enough to actually listen to what’s going on,” Newt says lightly. “I just saw him. Looked pretty much the same as ever.”

“Yes, well. He actually approved funding for K-science operations for at least the next three years.” Now that Newt had held, if just for a moment, a complete knowledge of Hermann’s vocal chord manipulation, he could tell that he was trying to keep the excitement out of his voice by lowering it.

Newt glances behind them at the far-away shuffling figures of the Shatterdome. 

“So, did the brigade come at you for an intervention?”

“Ms. Mori and Mr. Beckett?”

“You know. They have the most depressing names ever. Like as in 'Memento'? And _Samuel_ Beckett?”

And Hermann is laughing. And Newt turns to him in shock. His face looks so much younger, and Newt does not see smile lines, but what is this but the laying down of a long-shouldered burden?  _Is it_ _?_

 

...there is  _irgendwo, etwas zu sagen_...

 

“You do know that you’re staring out at the sea because of my memories. Not because of the kaiju.”

“I know, man.”

The waves are coming closer to them now, and yes, the tide is coming to them with crescendo crashes.

The white fringe of sea is mere fathoms away.

“Can we?” Hermann asks.

And it is the question that one asks because, the choice having been made in what feels like another lifetime, now, for the first time, there is someone here, here, _right here_ —who can see a way of being and seeing long dormant under so many layers of performing and seeming.

Newt looks at Hermann, whose laugh has settled into a smile that has transformed everything, and knows—even though he has never drifted before mere hours ago—what meaning is born having been arrived. 

Down into memory:

With a slate-blue glow, they both now fall into what must be handled–the neural bridge strengthening as they both approximate the heart of what is meant, the event horizon, and fall first into a cold night, and they see the moon and stardust and the aurora borealis mirrored in the North Sea. The Firth of Forth gaping into the fathomless navy blue, opening its arms wide to dissolve into…something that cannot be said without swallowing the giddiest smile and what can one see there but a world covered in fractals, multiplying and fraying to end at the shoreline in front of your feet—closing and opening, breathing just as all things do…and then, _yes is it?_ , it is…the North Sea once more and the canal-warren city and where is, when is that music that Newt has only dreamed of hearing as when he felt them dying and the analogue of dopamine chased with electricity as the consciousness separates from the hive mind and just _opening up_ into deep horns and strings lower than double-bass, playing in e-flat as that was the sound when the universe was created and the kaiju know this just as well a half a universe away, but now bathed in floor-dark synth and guitar samples that let harmonics that fly out of the itinerant violin draw of Bach’s Partita No. 3…And what happens when they look out onto that beautiful dark Pacific, a midnight-blue dye spilling out of Anchorage, the arctic waters sloshing and freezing and regrouping and melting and flying out from underneath the snow to Tokyo—and Fuji looms in the background as the train shoots west—and to the left, oh the _sea_! And the first exhaltant breath of Mahler 1 is all that can be played, a thousand times louder, and pain has transformed into the hertz that heart runs on, which _when did it begin to stutter_?, when did we agree that the heart did such a thing as _stutter_?, and we agreed that it began when we saw the glittering mass, the cathedral floor, the synagogic mosque of craqulured paintings and everything that was built of numbers, but can we think of numbers as a frequency, just the seven dimensions we cannot see twisted into subspace but the hum of a universe made not in bytes but by just the same thrumming strings and, and, the hum of the sea remains and they burst out onto the daylight of the bone slum when they scale the blue expanse and the helicopter almost dips to kiss the sea, and here they shall do their work, just like any other being who demands meaning and demands to know and demands to look at what is _beautiful_ , and even though what hides in the sea is math, is music, is what is beautiful itself.

Up unto sight.

And he sits on the right.

And he sits on the left. 

The right, slow music.

The left, stately.

And what lies before but the curling sea, calling and coaxing, now reaching their feet, their bare feet? And what lies before but a life of what the other wants: to know and to feel.

Newt shivers.

Hermann smiles.

And Newt slides up, just as if he were what lies before, and knows that, _yes he is, you are_ , and he kisses his perfect mouth, and Hermann, Hermann smiles completely. 


End file.
